SMU: Gremlins
by Stormhawk
Summary: There are gremlins in the Matrix...oh dear...


Title: Gremlins Author: Stormhawk Rating: PG  
  
Disclaimer: Matrix universe and associated characters: Wachowski brothers. Agents/SMU universe: co-owned by me and Mordax. The RA's belong to themselves. Updated disclaimer: Star Trek = Paramount Dr Who = BBC  
  
Word count: 2763 Notes: This is your present T'L, I hope you like it.  
  
For those of you who don't know, Gappy is our nickname for Morpheus. You need to know this or his joke won't be funny.  
  
Please Read and Review  
  
Random Agent T'Lorie sat at her desk hacking various parts of the Matrix for fun. It was so much fun to cause all kinds of glitches...and with a few more incidents like Bob she would soon send Agent Brown off his rocker and into a padded cell so she and the other RA's would only have Smith and Jones to deal with. Smith and Jones were easier to handle as they let them get away with...almost...anything.  
  
Right now she was so very bored...even though Tibet was suffering a spontaneous heat wave...because all of her fellow random agents were out for the day. This was unusual, but not unheard of.  
  
Just as she was about to hack Agent Brown's other gym equipment there was a knock at the door. "Come in," she muttered.  
  
"Jonesy!!!!!!!!" she squeaked as the short tech agent walked in.  
  
"Quite..." he said as he kept his distance from the hyper random agent. It always disturbed to know that T'Lorie was what he would be like as a teenage girl. The thought did keep him up late at night.  
  
"Can I help you Agent Jones?"  
  
"Well, yes if you aren't busy."  
  
"I'm not busy," she said as she required her computer into standby.  
  
"You aren't?" he asked in surprise, "but usually when you have free time you follow me around and as me questions and ask me to hack into off-limits files for you..."  
  
"The others have gone out," she said with a pout. "So I was hacking Tibet."  
  
"Oh dear," Jones said. "Can you un-hack it or you won't be allowed to help me with this special project."  
  
T'Lorie's hands were a blur as she returned Tibet to its normal state. The only adverse affect that this had was the one and only Hawaiian T-shirt went out business on its first day. "Special project? What kind of special project?"  
  
"You honestly don't know? But you get into all of my secret files, you know about AIMEE after all."  
  
"Yeah, but I've been kind of busy lately so I didn't have time to hack into your files this week. Are you ever going to update VWS?"  
  
"You've played every level already?"  
  
"No, but I like updates."  
  
"T'Lorie...special project?"  
  
"Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!"  
  
"Well," he said as he required a chair. "This is a new type of program to attack the rebels..."  
  
"Not the exiles?"  
  
"No, we will test them on the rebels to start with, interaction with the exiles would be an added element that may throw off the test data."  
  
"What kind of program is this?"  
  
"Unlike anything you have ever seen before, I assure you of that." He shifted them to his lab and sat down in front of his laptop.  
  
T'Lorie wandered around it, picking up needles full of code and other such tech things that interested her for no reason.  
  
"Excuse me..." Jones said to get her attention. T'Lorie turned and saw a small gremlin on the table in front of him. The small thing looked reptilian, and had black leathery skin and wings that were attached from it's hands to it's lower back. It had bright blue eyes and sharp fangs.  
  
"That thing is what exactly?" she asked as she walked over for a closer examination.  
  
"The new program. They should make a good attack force."  
  
"They? I only see one."  
  
"There are many more within the system. But I just wanted to bring one online to show it to you and ask you opinions."  
  
"You actually want my opinions Jones?" T'Lorie asked him with a grin.  
  
"Yes, well usually you just give them without me even asking but you always have valid concerns when it comes to new projects."  
  
"Yay!" she squeaked as she bounced around the room. "Jonesy said I was smart!!"  
  
He gave her a LOOK so she stopped bouncing and required a chair to sit beside him. "So I'm guessing these are a kind of 'fly my pretties fly' creature."  
  
"You would make an excellent wicked witch?"  
  
"What did you just say Jones?"  
  
"Oh, nothing..." he said with a small grin. "Well, what do you think?" he asked as he looked over at her. He blinked several times. "Agent T'Lorie, why are you hugging the gremlin?"  
  
"Because it's so cute!" she said with a smile as the gremlin purred and wrapped its wings around her arms.  
  
"It's not meant to be cute, it's supposed to be a dangerous, rebel hunter/killer."  
  
"Oh, I forgot," she said as she put it back up on the desk. "So is he going to go for a test flight?"  
  
"Yes, as soon as we find some rebels to test him on."  
  
"Does he have a name?"  
  
"Gremlin 001, AKA Riker."  
  
T'Lorie grinned, "but since he's bald, shouldn't you call him Picard?"  
  
The tech agent shook his head, "I would have but when I was testing him earlier he found one of Alocin's tea cups and it took an immediate dislike to tea."  
  
"Well, that makes sense."  
  
"I think we may have some rebels to test it on."  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"Star went out Neo-hunting...and usually she manages to find him."  
  
"So we send Riker to Agent Star's location?"  
  
"It seems like a good plan."  
  
Jones typed something into his laptop, the gremlin turned, saluted and disappeared.  
  
"Those things can shift?" T'L asked with wide eyes.  
  
"Of course they can," Jones said simply, "despite their appearance, they are system programs so therefore they share some common traits with us and the other programs."  
  
"Can they require?"  
  
"They have no need to. Their weapons are...built-in you might say so there is no need to require another gun and so on."  
  
"So it uses claws and fangs instead of Desert Eagles? I suppose that works." She watched as Jones followed the gremlin's progress through Star's general area and then got an idea. "Hey Jones, can I mess around with the coding of one?"  
  
The tech agent sighed and then relented, "all right, just so long as you are reasonable."  
  
"When am I anything else?" she asked with an innocent grin.  
  
"Do you really want me to answer that?" She shrugged, "use the next one, Gremlin 002."  
  
"AKA Data?" she asked in surprise.  
  
"Yes..." he said distractedly as he watched the gremlin in an aerial dogfight with Neo.  
  
"This is going to be fun," she said as she routed the program to her office and shifted back. When she got back, the gremlin was perched on her desk. "Ok, first I shall give you the ability to speak."  
  
That was an easy enough alteration, as the gremlins weren't dumb creatures. "Thank you," the gremlin said in an English accent.  
  
"AHHHH!!!!! Evil-English-accented-thing!!!!!! We have too many of those!!!!!!"  
  
The gremlin gave her a confused look then muttered something in French.  
  
T'Lorie shook her head, "no, you sound too much like Mero."  
  
"Gutten tag," he said, trying German this time.  
  
"You don't have to have an accent," she said shaking her head. "Just talk normally."  
  
"Well all right then," he said in a normal voice, free of any accents.  
  
"Hi! I'm Random Agent T'Lorie."  
  
"I am Gremlin 002, AKA Data, but I'm sure you know that already."  
  
"Yep."  
  
"Did you also know I am going to take over the world?"  
  
She let this sink in for a minute, in case she had heard him wrong. "Huh?"  
  
"And I have you to thank."  
  
"Me?" she asked the gremlin.  
  
"Yes you," he said as he spilt in two.  
  
"Did you just clone yourself?"  
  
"Yes," the original said. "I need more troops in order to take over the world."  
  
"But I was going to give you little sunglasses and a little tie with a tie clip, you were going to look so cute and then you could have gone off and had fun killing rebels."  
  
The gremlin considered this, "all right. That does sound better than world domination, and less time-consuming."  
  
"How could you?" the clone asked him. "We were going to rule the Matrix!"  
  
"Bah, I'm over that."  
  
"Well I'm not," the clone said as he shifted away.  
  
"Oh dear," Data the gremlin said as he shook his little head. "I think he's gone off to cause trouble."  
  
"Are you related to Sheerluck? You talk like he does."  
  
"But I have no accent, you took it away," he pointed out.  
  
"Doesn't matter...what does matter is your evil clone is going off to rule the world...and I'm sure Jones will blame me for this...and then I won't be able to help with special projects anymore!"  
  
"I hate to tell you, but this is your fault."  
  
"I didn't reprogram you to spontaneously clone yourself," she argued.  
  
"No, but you know your random glitch that circulates the entire Matrix causing havoc?"  
  
"That was one of my finest programming moments..." she said with a dreamy look.  
  
"It got into the gremlin programming. Riker was unaffected because Agent Jones was constantly updating his program but the rest of us..."  
  
"Just out of curiosity, how many gremlins are there?"  
  
"Four hundred and eighteen."  
  
"Should I tell Smith about this? So we can fix this before he yells at me?"  
  
"Well perhaps..."  
  
A dark cloud passed over the sun and out of curiosity T'Lorie went to look out her window. "Oh man..."  
  
The cloud that had blocked out the sun was not a normal cloud. It was a cloud of gremlins.  
  
"Is that all of them?" she asked Data.  
  
"Except for Obo. He's too lazy to go outside."  
  
"So what do I do?"  
  
"Telling Agent Jones might be a good place to start. He might be able to call them back and take them offline without trouble."  
  
"If he can't?"  
  
"You're going to have to hunt down every single one of them."  
  
"That could take a while..." she muttered. "Come on," she said and walked out of her office. Data landed on her shoulder and they walked down toward Jones' lab.  
  
"Are you purposely taking the long way?" he asked after they had been walking around for a while. "Because the longer you take getting there, the less chance there is of ending this quickly."  
  
"But he's going to be mad with me."  
  
"Who's going to be mad with you Agent T'Lorie?" a voice asked behind her.  
  
She turned and saw Smith. "Hello Smith," she said with a smile. "Is that a new tie?"  
  
"Why are you trying to change the subject and why do you have one of the gremlin programs on your shoulder?"  
  
"Well you see sir Agent Jones asked for my help with them so then I asked if I could examine and modify the programming of one of them but then he said he wanted to take over the world so I had to convince him otherwise. This is Data by the way, he's ok and doesn't want to take over the world anymore but the problem is that his clone does so his clone that doesn't have a name went and freed all of the rest of the gremlin programs so they are all flying around so now I have to go tell Jonesy that they went evil and somehow it's my fault cause of my randomly floating glitch that got into their programming and please don't delete me cause I didn't mean to cause trouble and I only wanted to help." She said really quickly without taking a breath.  
  
"I...see..."  
  
"You do? I'm glad the operation was a complete success," she said as she turned to run. He neatly caught her collar and dragged her down to Jones' lab.  
  
"Jones..."  
  
"I already know Smith..." Jones said as he furiously typed, trying to get the gremlin programs offline.  
  
"How did you know Jonesy?"  
  
He pointed to the window, "the screaming masses are hard to ignore."  
  
"Those are screaming masses?" T'Lorie asked. "Ah, we're kind of used to that."  
  
"So what do we do?" Smith asked.  
  
"Kill them," Brown said from the doorway. He threw a dead gremlin onto the ground and it disappeared in a spray of code. "Before they kill us!" he said as he held his baseball at. "They're out to get us!" he yelled as he ran down the hall. "Like the koalas!"  
  
"Ok..." T'Lorie muttered  
  
"He may be unstable, but he is correct," Smith said. "We need to destroy them and take the whole line back to formula...I mean, redesign the program."  
  
"I'll go get the other RA's and we'll start," T'Lorie said as she shifted away with Data before the other agents could say anything.  
  
She shifted to the middle of the city and held up three signs. 'Free cookies!' 'Free digestives!' and 'Free pictures of Neo!'  
  
Very, very soon there the other three RA's were standing there demanding their free stuff. "Sorry," she said, "we have work to do?"  
  
"Work?!?" they asked.  
  
"I...accidentally...and I mean really accidentally...unleashed a plague of gremlins into the city."  
  
"I am partially to blame," Data said, "after all, my clone is the ringleader."  
  
"What is that?" Alo asked.  
  
"He's data. One of the gremlins, but he's a good one. They are really easy to kill, just whack them with a baseball bat or something." She looked at Data, "do you have any problems with us killing your fellow programs?"  
  
"Not really, most of them are construct-like anyway, only me and a few others are intelligent – cause we were going to lead the others."  
  
"Let's get started," she said. The others nodded and headed off in different directions carrying various implements to deal with the gremlins.  
  
"THEY'RE IN MY HAIR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Gappy screamed as he ran down the street with a pack of gremlins after him.  
  
"I suppose we should go as well," T'Lorie said to Data.  
  
"What is that?" Data asked as he pointed to an old blue police-call box that had just appeared on the corner.  
  
"The TARDIS!" T'Lorie said as she bounced up and down and took several pictures of it.  
  
"So where are we professor?" a young woman asked as she stepped out of it.  
  
"You should find this place interesting Ace, it's a strange parallel future earth where there was a war between humans and AI. The machines won and now most of the humans live in this virtual reality system they call the Matrix."  
  
"Wicked. So are there AI in here? Will we see them?"  
  
"There's one over there," the Doctor said as he pointed to T'Lorie. "Let's go say hello."  
  
T'Lorie and Data just stood there as the Doctor and his companion walked over. "Hello," he said, "I'm the Doctor."  
  
"I know," T'Lorie said and looked at Ace. "Can I borrow you Dalek-whapping bat?"  
  
"Sure, it's in the TARDIS, I'll go get it," she said as she ran off to get it.  
  
"What do we have here?" the Doctor asked as he looked at Data. "This looks like a Pyru Bat from a moon around Tyri major."  
  
"He's actually a rebel hunter-killer whose clone is leading a world- domination team."  
  
"Oh dear."  
  
Ace returned and handed T'Lorie the baseball bat. "I'll trade you for the gargoyle."  
  
"Ace..."  
  
"Doctor you said I could have a pet."  
  
"I'm not a pet," Data said with a pout.  
  
"He talks, cool!"  
  
"Do you want to go with them?" T'Lorie asked him. "If you stay here Jonesy will probably have to delete you."  
  
"Well, all right," Data said as he hopped over to the top of the Doctor's hat. "It was nice to know you."  
  
"Bye Data!" she said with a wave as they got back into the TARDIS and left. T'Lorie lifted the evil-robot-whapping bat and went off to hunt gremlins.  
  
Four hours later.  
  
T'Lorie whapped the last gremlin and went and found the other RA's. She required them all drinks and they found a bench to sit on. "This was interesting..." Angel said. "But I never want to have to whap a hundred little freaky bat things again."  
  
"Agent T'Lorie?" Jones said as he walked up to them.  
  
"Uh-oh..." she said with a wince.  
  
"There is no need to worry. It may have been your floating glitch that caused this problem to begin with but it was actually a good thing."  
  
"It was?"  
  
"Yes," he explained. "The gremlin coding wasn't too well written and they would have broken down within a week anyway, this probably would have happened even without your...help."  
  
"So you're saying that glitches are a good thing?"  
  
"No. I am NOT saying that. But in this case it was helpful."  
  
"Glitches are good?"  
  
Jones sighed, "very well, glitches are good."  
  
"YAY!" T'Lorie said as she skipped around. "Glitches! Glitches of all kinds!"  
  
Sorry if it seemed rushed, but I wrote it kind of quickly.  
  
HAPPY BIRTHDAY T'LORIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
  
Requires lots of cake 


End file.
